Chapter 12 #2
Olivia gave a slow, considering nod. “And you think whatever’s happening, it’s going to peak around the time of the wedding?”
“I think it’s possible,” Delia replied. “Which is why I wanted to make sure you were somewhere safe.”
“And this place is safe?” Alec asked, inclining his head toward the chapel.
Delia allowed her psychic senses to extend beyond the wall she’d built, testing the energy patterns around the building.
The chapel sat on a minor ley line, but not one of the major intersection points the demons were targeting.
More importantly, she couldn’t sense any of the twisted supernatural signatures that marked the places where Vinea’s people had been working.
“Yes,” she said with more confidence than she’d felt all day. “This place should be fine.”
“Then let’s book it,” Olivia said.
Inside, Jeannette was waiting, wearing a professional smile although she had obvious questions in her eyes.
“We’d like to book the chapel for tomorrow,” Olivia said. “Seven-thirty in the evening, if possible.”
“Wonderful.” Jeannette’s smile looked genuinely warm now. “With so little lead time, I’m afraid I’ll need the entire amount up front.”
“That’s fine,” Alec said, pulling out his wallet.
While they handled the paperwork, Delia’s phone vibrated. A text from Ty appeared on the screen.
Multiple new incidents reported across the city. Pattern suggests major escalation within the next twenty-four hours. How’s the family situation?
The venue’s taken care of. Everyone’s in town now. Any word on Caleb?
Still working on it. Keep family away from downtown area if possible.
The text conversation ended there, leaving Delia with the uncomfortable realization that whatever Vinea was planning, it was accelerating faster than any of them had anticipated.
“Is everything all right?” Olivia asked, brow puckering in a small frown.
Lord knows what she must have looked like as she was texting with Ty. “Just coordinating all the other arrangements,” Delia said, which was true enough. “Making sure your vendors are on the same page about the venue change.”
Jeannette handed Alec a folder with copies of all the contracts. “I think you two are going to have a beautiful ceremony.”
As the three of them left the chapel and walked toward Delia’s little SUV, Olivia looked over at her cousin with an expression that was part gratitude and part concern.
“Thank you for all of this,” she said. “I know there’s more going on than you’re telling me, but I trust you.”
“You’re family,” Delia replied simply. “I’ll always do whatever it takes to make sure you’re happy.”
And safe, she added mentally.
Even as she got out her key fob to unlock the Kona, another wave of energy rolled over her, and this time it came with a vision so clear and immediate, she had to grip the door handle to keep herself from falling.
Once again, she saw Angel’s Dream transformed into something that belonged in a nightmare, with symbols carved into every surface and dark energy swirling through the air like smoke.
This time, she also saw Vinea in his true form — not the urbane businessman but something ancient and terrible and utterly without mercy, a thousand times worse than the other demons they’d battled so far.
But she also saw something else — a network of light that connected her to Caleb, to Ty, to Pru, and even to the city itself. Power flowed through the ley lines, true, but it also ran through the bonds of love and friendship and determination that held them all together.
“Delia?” Alec’s voice came to her from somewhere, tinny and faint. “Are you having another one of those…episodes?”
He sounded uncertain, and she couldn’t blame him.
Delia opened her eyes — when had she even closed them? — and found her cousin and Alec standing beside the car, concern obvious in every line of their faces.
“I’m okay,” she said, and realized that for the first time all day, she actually meant it. The energy still surged through her system, but now it felt less like a foreign invasion and more like a natural part of who she was becoming.
“Let’s go get that coffee,” she said, managing a genuine smile. “And then we need to pick up your parents at the hotel.”
As they drove away from the chapel, Delia found herself focusing on all the changes she could sense in the supernatural landscape around them…
more and more active sites, accompanied by stronger energy flows.
Thrown into the mix was the unmistakable presence of entities that had no business being on this plane of existence.
But she could also sense something else — a growing network of resistance.
People like herself, scattered throughout the city, whose natural psychic abilities were being awakened by the chaos.
There weren’t enough of them to mount a direct challenge to Vinea’s operation, but maybe there were enough to provide the kind of support her team would need when the time came.
Her phone vibrated again. This time, the message was from Pru.
Emergency meeting tonight after family dinner. Ty found something big.
Good or bad big?
Let’s go with ‘complicated’ big. Can you get away around eight?
Under normal circumstances, Delia would never have contemplated bailing on a family commitment. Everyone was meeting at Santorini’s at six, which should have given her plenty of time. But any get-together associated with a wedding tended to run long.
These weren’t normal circumstances, though. And if Pru and Ty had discovered something that could help them rescue Caleb and stop Vinea’s operation, then she had to be there.
I’ll make it work.
Yet another energy spike smashed into her just as she was shutting off the engine. But this time, instead of fighting it or trying to shield herself from it, Delia simply let it flow through her, accepting the power as part of who she was becoming.
Whatever happened tonight, whatever they learned at Pru’s emergency meeting, she would be ready.
By the time Delia managed to extract herself from the family dinner at Santorini’s, it was nearly eight-thirty.
The evening had stretched on longer than expected, through multiple courses, several rounds of toasts, and the kind of cheerful chatter that always seemed to happen when relatives who rarely saw each other tried to catch up on years’ worth of news in a single evening.
Under normal circumstances, she would have enjoyed every minute of it.
Olivia’s relief at having the venue situation resolved was infectious, and both sets of parents seemed genuinely pleased with how smoothly everything was falling into place.
Even Alec, who’d been skeptical about the last-minute change, admitted that Little Chapel of Hearts seemed to be a better place for the ceremony than Angel’s Dream.
But with every passing hour, Delia found it harder to ignore the supernatural energy building across the city, pressing against the mental walls she’d constructed.
By the time she’d finally made her excuses and headed for Pru’s condo, her nerves were stretched, so frayed that they might as well have been made of old string.
The building’s elevator seemed to take forever, and when she finally reached Pru’s door, she thought she could hear voices from inside before she even knocked.
“About time,” Pru said as she opened the door, then stepped aside to let Delia enter. Her dark green hair fell around her face, and the faint circles under her eyes told Delia that she must have been working nonstop for hours.
Ty stood by the window that overlooked the city, his fingers tapping on the glass in a nervous rhythm that seemed very unlike him. When he turned away so he could face the two women, the strain in his handsome features was obvious even from all the way across the room.
“How bad is it?” she asked, figuring there wasn’t any point in wasting time on greetings.
“Even worse than we thought,” Ty replied as he moved away from the window to join them in the living room. “The timeline’s accelerated. Vinea’s not waiting until midnight tomorrow to get started.”
Delia sank onto Pru’s sectional, all of her muscles suddenly sore, as if the day’s accumulated stress had finally caught up with her. “How much time do we have?”
“The ritual begins at eight tomorrow evening,” Pru said. She also settled on the sectional, but perched at the far end of the L, as if she thought she might need to get up and go over to her laptop at any second. “Peak power will be at 11:47, but by then it’ll be too late to stop anything.”
“How do you know all this?” Delia asked, looking from her friend over to Ty. It was good that they’d been able to unearth this information, but it wasn’t the sort of thing they could have picked up from a simple Google search.
The half angel’s expression darkened. “Because I’ve been monitoring my people’s communications all day, and the higher-ups are in full crisis mode.
This isn’t just about Las Vegas anymore.
If Vinea succeeds in opening those permanent gateways, it’ll destabilize the barriers between planes across the entire continent. ”
All this unwelcome news made Delia want to throw up her hands in despair, but she knew that wasn’t an option. No, they’d have to soldier through this, no matter what happened. “And they’re not sending help?”
“They can’t intervene directly without risking an all-out supernatural war,” Ty said.
With an impatient hand, he reached up to pull away the rubber band that held his heavy dark hair away from his face, then neatly bound it up again, as if it had been bothering him.
“There are rules about these kinds of things. I’m allowed to work with you because I’m half mortal and have a stake on this plane, the same as you do, but any actual angelic intervention is completely off the table. ’”
That was a nugget of information she hadn’t possessed previously, but, interesting as it might have been, it certainly didn’t change anything about their current situation.